Amp is the coding agent and development environment that runs anywhere and everywhere.
amp-devs@ampcode.com
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"Just use a cheaper model" sounds like saving money.
But fiber didn't just make your internet faster. It made whole new businesses possible. @thorstenball and @sqs discuss how the same is true with frontier models.
Would you prefer to save money with dial-up when your competitors are using fiber?
Recorded on Hot Take Thursday, @sqs and @thorstenball are back with a new Raising An Agent. In this episode they discuss how cheaper models end up costing more, why they do not not wait for agents, running evals in Orbs, and the hot takes Thorsten left out of his X post last week.
00:00 Intro: Engineers who forget the history of technology
01:55 Hot Take Thursday & a €50-a-week token budget
05:14 Why cheap models cost more than frontier models
08:11 Token budgets & who gets priced out
14:06 Disrupt yourself with small teams & unlimited tokens
16:38 Agents go horizontal across the software lifecycle
20:56 Rollouts, bug reports & "I'm feeling Pucky"
23:53 Code review, monorepos & other walls around the agent
25:30 How to show a cautious company what agents can do
29:48 Why most people haven't seen what agents can do
31:57 Don't wait for your agent
33:38 Simple evals & agents testing agents in Orbs
38:27 Why Amp has runners too
40:47 Follow your energy & stay aligned
46:33 The hot take Thorsten left out
54:14 Do languages & frameworks still matter?
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You can also watch it on YouTube: piped.video/3v7dIHh15dk
Or listen to it on Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/1AL44J…
If you want to listen to all of them: ampcode.com/podcast
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Would you prefer to save money with dial-up when your competitors are using fiber?
Recorded on Hot Take Thursday, @sqs and @thorstenball are back with a new Raising An Agent. In this episode they discuss how cheaper models end up costing more, why they do not not wait for agents, running evals in Orbs, and the hot takes Thorsten left out of his X post last week.
00:00 Intro: Engineers who forget the history of technology
01:55 Hot Take Thursday & a €50-a-week token budget
05:14 Why cheap models cost more than frontier models
08:11 Token budgets & who gets priced out
14:06 Disrupt yourself with small teams & unlimited tokens
16:38 Agents go horizontal across the software lifecycle
20:56 Rollouts, bug reports & "I'm feeling Pucky"
23:53 Code review, monorepos & other walls around the agent
25:30 How to show a cautious company what agents can do
29:48 Why most people haven't seen what agents can do
31:57 Don't wait for your agent
33:38 Simple evals & agents testing agents in Orbs
38:27 Why Amp has runners too
40:47 Follow your energy & stay aligned
46:33 The hot take Thorsten left out
54:14 Do languages & frameworks still matter?
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@sqs and @thorsten on the decay of the local dev env:
"We found this with the shift to orbs, when as soon as you started making the Orb environment good, that's all people ever wanted to use."
What is the computer for now?
In Raising an Agent S2E4, @sqs and @thorstenball explore how agents can do more than just ship code, discuss recent outages, and ask what happens to our computers when more work moves into Orbs.
00:00 Intro: What is the computer for now?
01:32 New models & aiming higher with agents
04:42 An agent's job after the code ships
10:19 Mini evals & keeping the team's context in threads
13:38 Performance testing & production canaries
18:36 Amp's recent outages & what went wrong
24:44 Shipping faster & the tradeoffs of redundancy
28:34 How fast can an engineering team go?
32:27 Making production logs & metrics useful to agents
37:15 Beyond local development
41:30 Agents building 3D models & virtual worlds
43:35 Simpler devices & dictating work on the go
47:29 What happens to the tools we love?
49:27 Steering, queuing & changing workflows
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@sqs on the advantage of using a single coding agent across the whole org:
"All of our intent, all of our history, is in Amp, in threads, in something that's legible to the agent."
"You can see why this was added here, and you don't just get the commit message, you also get everything the human said to get it there."
"If you are a company that's using seven different agents... I understand why a lot of companies do that, that might be a reality, but you are going to lose out on a lot of Agent Power if you do not have all of that context accessible to the agent."
What is the computer for now?
In Raising an Agent S2E4, @sqs and @thorstenball explore how agents can do more than just ship code, discuss recent outages, and ask what happens to our computers when more work moves into Orbs.
00:00 Intro: What is the computer for now?
01:32 New models & aiming higher with agents
04:42 An agent's job after the code ships
10:19 Mini evals & keeping the team's context in threads
13:38 Performance testing & production canaries
18:36 Amp's recent outages & what went wrong
24:44 Shipping faster & the tradeoffs of redundancy
28:34 How fast can an engineering team go?
32:27 Making production logs & metrics useful to agents
37:15 Beyond local development
41:30 Agents building 3D models & virtual worlds
43:35 Simpler devices & dictating work on the go
47:29 What happens to the tools we love?
49:27 Steering, queuing & changing workflows
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"I'm just pointing at things and saying, make it like this and ship this and do this. The altitude is so high. It's wild. Even compared to two months ago."
@thorstenball on using agents for the whole lifecycle of a feature: building, testing, shipping, monitoring the rollout, toggling feature flags, talking to users.
What is the computer for now?
In Raising an Agent S2E4, @sqs and @thorstenball explore how agents can do more than just ship code, discuss recent outages, and ask what happens to our computers when more work moves into Orbs.
00:00 Intro: What is the computer for now?
01:32 New models & aiming higher with agents
04:42 An agent's job after the code ships
10:19 Mini evals & keeping the team's context in threads
13:38 Performance testing & production canaries
18:36 Amp's recent outages & what went wrong
24:44 Shipping faster & the tradeoffs of redundancy
28:34 How fast can an engineering team go?
32:27 Making production logs & metrics useful to agents
37:15 Beyond local development
41:30 Agents building 3D models & virtual worlds
43:35 Simpler devices & dictating work on the go
47:29 What happens to the tools we love?
49:27 Steering, queuing & changing workflows
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You can also watch it on YouTube: piped.video/7pstrDQ4xLs
Or listen to it on Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/1AL44J…
If you want to listen to all of them: ampcode.com/podcast
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What is the computer for now?
In Raising an Agent S2E4, @sqs and @thorstenball explore how agents can do more than just ship code, discuss recent outages, and ask what happens to our computers when more work moves into Orbs.
00:00 Intro: What is the computer for now?
01:32 New models & aiming higher with agents
04:42 An agent's job after the code ships
10:19 Mini evals & keeping the team's context in threads
13:38 Performance testing & production canaries
18:36 Amp's recent outages & what went wrong
24:44 Shipping faster & the tradeoffs of redundancy
28:34 How fast can an engineering team go?
32:27 Making production logs & metrics useful to agents
37:15 Beyond local development
41:30 Agents building 3D models & virtual worlds
43:35 Simpler devices & dictating work on the go
47:29 What happens to the tools we love?
49:27 Steering, queuing & changing workflows
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"I could just replace that with EC2 and some shell scripts and get the same thing."
But could you?
Thoughts and question of when to build and when to buy.
And @sqs putting @thorstenball fully on the spot by asking him whether people should build their own Amp or not.
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@thorstenball's pet theory on why engineers are so busy tweaking skills and tools and workflows:
"Because it can't be that easy, right?"
Raising an Agent, S2E3: When Tokens Flow Like Electricity.
@sqs and @thorstenball on what happens when intelligence gets cheap: build vs. buy flips, why everyone building software to build software to do X is probably incorrect, and when software starts to feel like owning a house instead of renting one.
00:00 Intro: Cheap intelligence & doing X instead of building software to do X
01:06 Back home after Munich & what's changed in how we build
02:06 Predictions: the price of intelligence drops, tokens flow like electricity
05:54 Everyone is building dev tools & why that's the wrong bet
06:57 Pet theory: engineers can't believe it's this easy
10:33 Orbs vs. EC2, a VPN & tmux
17:18 Build vs. buy when the models keep changing
20:14 If Amp is worth buying, why isn't an issue tracker?
27:34 Killing features & vibe coding the 2% of a SaaS product you need
30:03 Build on a solid core: glue code is the worst part
33:19 The two Amps: jellyware, homeowners & renters
37:01 Exporting the Amp way to more teams
43:42 Opinionated software from people you trust
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Quinn on everyone now building developer tooling:
"Just building software to do X is only valuable if you can get people to pay and I think that's going to be a lot harder."
Raising an Agent, S2E3: When Tokens Flow Like Electricity.
@sqs and @thorstenball on what happens when intelligence gets cheap: build vs. buy flips, why everyone building software to build software to do X is probably incorrect, and when software starts to feel like owning a house instead of renting one.
00:00 Intro: Cheap intelligence & doing X instead of building software to do X
01:06 Back home after Munich & what's changed in how we build
02:06 Predictions: the price of intelligence drops, tokens flow like electricity
05:54 Everyone is building dev tools & why that's the wrong bet
06:57 Pet theory: engineers can't believe it's this easy
10:33 Orbs vs. EC2, a VPN & tmux
17:18 Build vs. buy when the models keep changing
20:14 If Amp is worth buying, why isn't an issue tracker?
27:34 Killing features & vibe coding the 2% of a SaaS product you need
30:03 Build on a solid core: glue code is the worst part
33:19 The two Amps: jellyware, homeowners & renters
37:01 Exporting the Amp way to more teams
43:42 Opinionated software from people you trust
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What can United Airlines teach Anthropic and OpenAI about pricing?
Or, what does flying economy have to do with token subsidies?
Raising an Agent, S2E3: When Tokens Flow Like Electricity.
@sqs and @thorstenball on what happens when intelligence gets cheap: build vs. buy flips, why everyone building software to build software to do X is probably incorrect, and when software starts to feel like owning a house instead of renting one.
00:00 Intro: Cheap intelligence & doing X instead of building software to do X
01:06 Back home after Munich & what's changed in how we build
02:06 Predictions: the price of intelligence drops, tokens flow like electricity
05:54 Everyone is building dev tools & why that's the wrong bet
06:57 Pet theory: engineers can't believe it's this easy
10:33 Orbs vs. EC2, a VPN & tmux
17:18 Build vs. buy when the models keep changing
20:14 If Amp is worth buying, why isn't an issue tracker?
27:34 Killing features & vibe coding the 2% of a SaaS product you need
30:03 Build on a solid core: glue code is the worst part
33:19 The two Amps: jellyware, homeowners & renters
37:01 Exporting the Amp way to more teams
43:42 Opinionated software from people you trust
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Is vibe coding fun?
Or does it take away the funnest parts of programming and leave you with the rest?
Raising an Agent, S2E3: When Tokens Flow Like Electricity.
@sqs and @thorstenball on what happens when intelligence gets cheap: build vs. buy flips, why everyone building software to build software to do X is probably incorrect, and when software starts to feel like owning a house instead of renting one.
00:00 Intro: Cheap intelligence & doing X instead of building software to do X
01:06 Back home after Munich & what's changed in how we build
02:06 Predictions: the price of intelligence drops, tokens flow like electricity
05:54 Everyone is building dev tools & why that's the wrong bet
06:57 Pet theory: engineers can't believe it's this easy
10:33 Orbs vs. EC2, a VPN & tmux
17:18 Build vs. buy when the models keep changing
20:14 If Amp is worth buying, why isn't an issue tracker?
27:34 Killing features & vibe coding the 2% of a SaaS product you need
30:03 Build on a solid core: glue code is the worst part
33:19 The two Amps: jellyware, homeowners & renters
37:01 Exporting the Amp way to more teams
43:42 Opinionated software from people you trust
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You can also watch it on YouTube: piped.video/SI3N8MCQHfo
Or listen to it on Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/1AL44J…
If you want to listen to all of them: ampcode.com/podcast
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Raising an Agent, S2E3: When Tokens Flow Like Electricity.
@sqs and @thorstenball on what happens when intelligence gets cheap: build vs. buy flips, why everyone building software to build software to do X is probably incorrect, and when software starts to feel like owning a house instead of renting one.
00:00 Intro: Cheap intelligence & doing X instead of building software to do X
01:06 Back home after Munich & what's changed in how we build
02:06 Predictions: the price of intelligence drops, tokens flow like electricity
05:54 Everyone is building dev tools & why that's the wrong bet
06:57 Pet theory: engineers can't believe it's this easy
10:33 Orbs vs. EC2, a VPN & tmux
17:18 Build vs. buy when the models keep changing
20:14 If Amp is worth buying, why isn't an issue tracker?
27:34 Killing features & vibe coding the 2% of a SaaS product you need
30:03 Build on a solid core: glue code is the worst part
33:19 The two Amps: jellyware, homeowners & renters
37:01 Exporting the Amp way to more teams
43:42 Opinionated software from people you trust
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Do you still need to read every line of code?
Or are there faster ways, even if you want to be 100% confident about a code change?
Episode 2 of Raising an Agent Season 2: Orbs and Jellyware.
@sqs and @thorstenball recorded this one together in person in Munich last week, where the whole Amp team had gathered for a week of building.
They discuss why isolated Orbs make it easier to run agents in parallel, how the team asks agents for exhaustive verification, and how production itself can become a feedback loop.
They also discuss jellyware: high-quality software that is designed to change quickly. When agents make software more malleable, teams can fix bugs faster and raise the quality bar instead of lowering it.
00:00 Intro: Agents in Orbs & production feedback loops
01:17 Recording together in Munich & what shipped since episode 1
03:56 How the Amp team adopted Orbs
07:00 Giving agents safe production access
11:01 Zero-friction threads & the limits of local checkouts
13:02 Asking agents for 100% proof
18:54 Production as a feedback loop
22:15 Multiplayer & agents as collaborative tools
24:13 Design workflows with Portals
27:27 High-quality software beyond vibe coding
31:17 How code review changes when agents write the code
35:26 Dictation & getting better context into agents
39:08 Jellyware: high-quality software that changes fast
42:27 Faster bug fixes, feedback & the quality budget
49:34 What Amp shipped: subscriptions, Puck, and agent communication
51:42 Automations, polling, and webhooks
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What changes when each agent gets its own disposable computer?
For us, turns out a lot.
Episode 2 of Raising an Agent Season 2: Orbs and Jellyware.
@sqs and @thorstenball recorded this one together in person in Munich last week, where the whole Amp team had gathered for a week of building.
They discuss why isolated Orbs make it easier to run agents in parallel, how the team asks agents for exhaustive verification, and how production itself can become a feedback loop.
They also discuss jellyware: high-quality software that is designed to change quickly. When agents make software more malleable, teams can fix bugs faster and raise the quality bar instead of lowering it.
00:00 Intro: Agents in Orbs & production feedback loops
01:17 Recording together in Munich & what shipped since episode 1
03:56 How the Amp team adopted Orbs
07:00 Giving agents safe production access
11:01 Zero-friction threads & the limits of local checkouts
13:02 Asking agents for 100% proof
18:54 Production as a feedback loop
22:15 Multiplayer & agents as collaborative tools
24:13 Design workflows with Portals
27:27 High-quality software beyond vibe coding
31:17 How code review changes when agents write the code
35:26 Dictation & getting better context into agents
39:08 Jellyware: high-quality software that changes fast
42:27 Faster bug fixes, feedback & the quality budget
49:34 What Amp shipped: subscriptions, Puck, and agent communication
51:42 Automations, polling, and webhooks
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Some say AI has led to more bugs, slop, and the enshittification of software.
But did it?
Episode 2 of Raising an Agent Season 2: Orbs and Jellyware.
@sqs and @thorstenball recorded this one together in person in Munich last week, where the whole Amp team had gathered for a week of building.
They discuss why isolated Orbs make it easier to run agents in parallel, how the team asks agents for exhaustive verification, and how production itself can become a feedback loop.
They also discuss jellyware: high-quality software that is designed to change quickly. When agents make software more malleable, teams can fix bugs faster and raise the quality bar instead of lowering it.
00:00 Intro: Agents in Orbs & production feedback loops
01:17 Recording together in Munich & what shipped since episode 1
03:56 How the Amp team adopted Orbs
07:00 Giving agents safe production access
11:01 Zero-friction threads & the limits of local checkouts
13:02 Asking agents for 100% proof
18:54 Production as a feedback loop
22:15 Multiplayer & agents as collaborative tools
24:13 Design workflows with Portals
27:27 High-quality software beyond vibe coding
31:17 How code review changes when agents write the code
35:26 Dictation & getting better context into agents
39:08 Jellyware: high-quality software that changes fast
42:27 Faster bug fixes, feedback & the quality budget
49:34 What Amp shipped: subscriptions, Puck, and agent communication
51:42 Automations, polling, and webhooks
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The cost of fixing bugs has changed tremendously over the last two years.
Have you rethought how you build software with that in mind?
Episode 2 of Raising an Agent Season 2: Orbs and Jellyware.
@sqs and @thorstenball recorded this one together in person in Munich last week, where the whole Amp team had gathered for a week of building.
They discuss why isolated Orbs make it easier to run agents in parallel, how the team asks agents for exhaustive verification, and how production itself can become a feedback loop.
They also discuss jellyware: high-quality software that is designed to change quickly. When agents make software more malleable, teams can fix bugs faster and raise the quality bar instead of lowering it.
00:00 Intro: Agents in Orbs & production feedback loops
01:17 Recording together in Munich & what shipped since episode 1
03:56 How the Amp team adopted Orbs
07:00 Giving agents safe production access
11:01 Zero-friction threads & the limits of local checkouts
13:02 Asking agents for 100% proof
18:54 Production as a feedback loop
22:15 Multiplayer & agents as collaborative tools
24:13 Design workflows with Portals
27:27 High-quality software beyond vibe coding
31:17 How code review changes when agents write the code
35:26 Dictation & getting better context into agents
39:08 Jellyware: high-quality software that changes fast
42:27 Faster bug fixes, feedback & the quality budget
49:34 What Amp shipped: subscriptions, Puck, and agent communication
51:42 Automations, polling, and webhooks
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You can also watch it on YouTube: piped.video/FfCCEZ00RFw
Or listen to it on Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/1AL44J…
If you want to listen to all of them: ampcode.com/podcast
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Episode 2 of Raising an Agent Season 2: Orbs and Jellyware.
@sqs and @thorstenball recorded this one together in person in Munich last week, where the whole Amp team had gathered for a week of building.
They discuss why isolated Orbs make it easier to run agents in parallel, how the team asks agents for exhaustive verification, and how production itself can become a feedback loop.
They also discuss jellyware: high-quality software that is designed to change quickly. When agents make software more malleable, teams can fix bugs faster and raise the quality bar instead of lowering it.
00:00 Intro: Agents in Orbs & production feedback loops
01:17 Recording together in Munich & what shipped since episode 1
03:56 How the Amp team adopted Orbs
07:00 Giving agents safe production access
11:01 Zero-friction threads & the limits of local checkouts
13:02 Asking agents for 100% proof
18:54 Production as a feedback loop
22:15 Multiplayer & agents as collaborative tools
24:13 Design workflows with Portals
27:27 High-quality software beyond vibe coding
31:17 How code review changes when agents write the code
35:26 Dictation & getting better context into agents
39:08 Jellyware: high-quality software that changes fast
42:27 Faster bug fixes, feedback & the quality budget
49:34 What Amp shipped: subscriptions, Puck, and agent communication
51:42 Automations, polling, and webhooks
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You can also watch it on YouTube: piped.video/watch?v=Kpg_D5MU…
Or listen to it on Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/1AL44J…
If you want to listen to all of them: ampcode.com/podcast
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Raising An Agent is back!
In the first episode of season 2, @sqs and @thorstenball discuss why the Amp team went heads-down the last few months to rebuild Amp around remote-controllable, parallel agents, running locally or in orbs.
They also talk about how this shift changed our development workflows and what that means for the future of local development.
00:00 Intro: Is local development obsolete?
00:53 What we've been up to since "the coding agent is dead"
03:03 The Amp Neo rewrite and what has changed
07:38 From unconstrained tokens to unconstrained parallel agents
11:25 How orbs change our development workflow
18:25 Cloud agents are underestimated
20:18 Killing obsolete features & choosing agents as a team
23:35 Why developers overestimate local development
27:54 Pushing straight to main & rethinking CI
31:20 How agents will reshape teams, products & companies
36:40 Complex dev environments & standardization
43:20 Amp subscriptions
45:55 What’s shipping next
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Amp's deep & rush modes (GPT-5.5) now finish your work up to 40% faster.
We rebuilt Amp last month to make this possible, cutting hops between you⭤GPU and running agent loops in durable execution to get the max benefit from long-lived OpenAI websockets.
ampcode.com/news/faster-deep…
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Amp Labs: small teams of the best software builders, working inside the most frontier-oriented company per industry and region.
ampcode.com/news/amp-labs
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You can also watch it on YouTube: piped.video/4rx36wc9ugw
Or listen to it on Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/1AL44J…
If you want to listen to all of them: ampcode.com/podcast
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Episode 10 of Raising An Agent with @sqs and @thorstenball is out!
There's no better summary than this quote:
"We will be killing our editor extension, the Amp VS Code extension. We're going to be killing it. And we're going to be killing it because we think it's no longer the future. We think the sidebar is dead. Let's walk through why."
Topics in this episode:
- The new deep mode in Amp
- Balancing developer experience for humans & agents
- Killing the VSCode extension & shift away from traditional editors
- Pi & OpenClaw, two wonderful projects
- Importance of reinventing yourself in AI
Enjoy! And happy hacking!
Timestamps:
01:00 Deep Mode
10:30 Optimizing the codebase for agents
15:00 Feature Preview: which Skills does your team use?
18:00 Balancing DX for humans & agents
21:35 Killing the Amp editor extension
28:00 The future of software and what it means
33:00 You need to stay agile
36:00 Pi & OpenClaw
39:00 Text editors holding companies back
44:00 Is manual context management coming to an end?
49:00 New concept for Threads
50:00 Amp, the business & the art installation
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You can also watch it on YouTube: piped.video/2wjnV6F2arc
Or listen to it on Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/1AL44J…
If you want to listen to all of them: ampcode.com/podcast
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After many months, a lot of model releases and even more Amp releases, here it is:
A new episode of Raising An Agent with @sqs and @thorstenball.
They discuss:
- Why Gemini 3 might have been the inflection point, not Opus 4.5
- What changed over Christmas and why everybody talks about agents now
- "The assistant is dead, long live the factory"
- How codebases need to adapt for agents
- Why small/local models don't give you an impression of the frontier
- What does it mean for a codebase to be agent-friendly?
- New things coming to Amp
Enjoy! And happy hacking!
Timestamps:
1:51 The Impact of Gemini 3 and Opus 4.5
5:28 Shifting Perceptions of AI Agents
10:17 Adapting Codebases for AI Efficiency
14:48 The Future of Software Development with AI Agents
19:29 Challenges and Opportunities Ahead
24:00 The Importance of Frontier Models
25:12 Adapting to AI-Driven Workflows
26:57 The Future of Coding Agents
28:07 Building an Agentic Code Base
30:22 Rethinking Development Tools
31:44 Amp's Evolution and Team Dynamics
33:00 Discord Q&A
39:18 Teasing New Features: Deep
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